A German woman who identifies herself only as “Anna Konda” described to Vice Media her Female Fight Club in Berlin, where women test themselves in wrestling matches. While some of the women are fetish-motivated dominants, others display no particular sexuality. The latter is the case for Anna herself, who, she admits, simply likes to “crush” men’s and women’s skulls between her massive thighs. Anna says she is a product of East Germany’s cliched development of tough, muscular female athletes.
‘I Am Incompetent!’
Kansas lawyer Dennis Hawver was disbarred in November for his poor defense of double-murder suspect Phillip Cheatham in 2005, which led to a new trial for Cheatham. Hawver had admitted to the jury that his client was a “shooter of people” — he had a previous manslaughter conviction — who, as an “experienced” criminal, would never have left a third victim alive with multiple gunshot wounds. A confident Hawver had virtually invited the jury to execute “whoever” the killer was. At a September hearing to keep his license, he dressed as Thomas Jefferson, banging the lectern and shouting, “I am incompetent!” Cheatham told the Topeka Capital-Journal that Hawver is “a good dude but just in over his head.”
Those Alabama Schools
— In October, a mother charged that officials at E.R. Dickson School in Mobile, Ala., first detained her daughter, 5, for pointing a crayon at another student as if it were a gun. They then pressured the girl to sign a paper promising not to kill anyone or commit suicide. “What is suicide, Mommy?” the girl asked when her parents arrived.
— In a 2010 incident at Sparkman Middle School near Huntsville, Ala., an administrator coaxed a special-needs girl, 14, into a boys’ bathroom to “bait” a 16-year-old boy who had previous sexual misconduct issues into committing a sexual offense. The administrator failed to protect the girl. The girl’s family sued and won a summary judgment. But the school board appealed. In September, 2014, the U.S. Justice Department formally endorsed the family’s lawsuit.
The Blind Darts Team
The West Briton newspaper reported in October that a darts team composed of blind men was ready for its inaugural match at an inn in Grampound, England. The inn’s landlord acknowledged the game-room door would be closed “just in case” a dart strayed off course. The blind darters are aided by a string attached to the bull’s eye that they can feel if they need guidance.
Police Report
Police in North Kingstown, R.I., reported twice in one month that women had complained of a motorist who stopped female strangers on the street to tell them jokes about blonde women. The jokes weren’t sexual, but still made the women “uncomfortable.” A high school girl told her mother of a similar episode. Based on a license plate number, police visited the man at home, and he agreed to stop.
Unclear On The Concept
— Nderitu Njoka, head of the Global Men’s Empowerment Network in Nairobi, Kenya, announced that his organization would commence a sex boycott for five days, denying men’s “services” to their wives. They were to do this to protest “tyrannical” female domination. According to Njoka, hundreds of Kenyan men are physically assaulted by females every year (including at least 100 whose wives castrate them). Njoka offered support to the singer Jay Z for being punched by his sister-in-law Solange Knowles.
— According to the deputy police commissioner in Calcutta, a group of student doctors at Nilratan Sarkar Medical College cornered, beat, maimed and eventually killed a man they suspected of rummaging through their belongings and stealing their mobile phones. The incident followed a series of phone and laptop thefts. Some of the enraged medical students slashed the man’s genitals before leaving him to die.
Can’t Possibly Be True
— A passerby shooting video outside the Lucky River Chinese restaurant in San Francisco caught an employee banging large slabs of frozen meat on the sidewalk. The manager told a KPIX-TV reporter that the worker was trying to defrost the meat. The reporter, visiting the precise sidewalk area on the video, found it covered in “blackened gum, cigarette butts and foot-tracked bacteria.” The manager said the worker had been fired and the meat discarded. The restaurant’s previous health department rating was 88, which qualifies as “adequate.”
— India’s Orissa state has established “health camps” to facilitate mass sterilizations to help control the booming population. Procedures were halted in November when Dr. Mahesh Chandra Rout matter-of-factly told BBC News that camps routinely used ordinary bicycle pumps to inflate women’s abdomens. Orissa’s senior health official immediately ended the practice and ordered that sterilizations only take place in hospitals. Enlarging the abdomen is an improper manner of enabling a surgeon to operate.
— The Food and Veterinary Administration of Denmark shut down the food supplier Nordic Ingredients after learning that it used an ordinary cement mixer to prepare gelatin products for nursing home and hospital patients who are unable to swallow whole food. An FVA official told a reporter: “It was an orange cement mixer just like bricklayers use. There were layers (of crusty remains) from previous uses.” As many as 12 facilities, including three hospitals, had food on hand from Nordic Ingredients.
Government In Action
— Asst. Attorney General Karen Straughn of Maryland warned consumers to watch out for a “$100 bill on the windshield” scam. She said if a consumer notices a $100 bill tucked under his wiper, he should not try to retrieve it; it is there to trick the driver into opening his door to a carjacker. When questioned by WJLA-TV of Washington, D.C., Straughn admitted there were no actual reports of such attempts. She also agreed the story is a well-known urban legend. But she nonetheless defended the warning.
— North Hempstead, N.Y., enforces its dog-littering ordinance with steep $250 fines and street-sign warnings displaying the amount. However, insiders have long known that the signs are wrong. The written regulation calls for fines of only $25. Officials have been discussing ways to correct their error while still discouraging littering. According to a November WCBS-TV report, now that residents know the actual amount, the debate is whether to replace the erroneous signs (expensive) or just raise the fine 1,000 percent (to $250) and save money.
— A November order from China’s State Administration for Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television appears to impose a ban on the use of puns as part of the government’s crackdown on nonstandard language. It is thought that the use of puns discourages children from learning proper vocabulary and grammar. All mass media outlets must “avoid changing the characters, phrasings and meanings” of words. Still, according to the Beijing reporter for London’s The Guardian, Chinese culture is saturated with puns.
— As revealed in a spirited public meeting of the Huron Valley, Mich., Board of Education in November, the nature of gun-carriers’ freedoms in the state appears to be a complicated matter. A person with training who submits to state licensing to carry a concealed weapon may carry it even on school grounds — in violation of the federal Gun-Free Zones Act of 1990. Michigan’s lawful exception to the act requires concealed permit-holders to carry the gun unconcealed, which many parents say frightens young children. Also, though it is illegal for anyone who is alcohol-impaired to carry a gun anywhere, the legal threshold for presumed impairment in Michigan is only .02 percent for a licensed permit holder, while it is .08 percent for unlicensed “open carriers” who are not covered by the “concealed” law.
Dying To Get A Date
People who work in “death professions” in the U.K. may feel that it’s difficult for them to find like-minded dates. For this reason, Carla Valentine established Dead Meet earlier this year. She told Vice.com in October that she has had 5,000 sign-ups among morticians, coroners, embalmers, cemetery workers, taxidermists, etc. Valentine said embalmers may make especially good boyfriends because their work with cosmetics helps them understand why “many women take so long to get ready.”
The Continuing Crisis
— To spark interest in the new leisure center opening in spring 2015 in Selby in North Yorkshire, England, the management company WLCT sponsored a contest to name the center, with the prize a year’s free membership for the winner. On Nov. 5, general manager Paul Hirst announced that Steve Wadsworth was the winner, proclaiming, “Well done to Steve on winning the competition.” The winning entry: “Selby Leisure Centre.”
— As young professionals have embraced urban neighborhoods, locally grown produce has proliferated in community (and even backyard) gardens. It is thought to be healthier than pesticide-laden commercial produce. However, the New York Post revealed in November that such gardens in construction-dense New York City are vulnerable to astonishingly high levels of lead and other toxic metals. One community garden in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, for example, showed levels of lead nearly 20 times the safe level.
Wait. What?
In November, a clothing store on Yabao Road in Beijing came under criticism for posting a sign that read “Chinese Not Admitted,” on its door. An employee told the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper that no one should believe that “we Chinese look down upon ourselves. But some Chinese customers are too annoying.” A legal scholar told the newspaper that China has no law against racial or ethnic discrimination.
Least Competent Criminals
— Police in Murfreesboro, N.C., announced they had intercepted a shipment of 30 pounds of marijuana that had been loosely packaged and shipped from California by U.S. Mail. Police Chief Darrell Rowe told WTKR-TV that the scent of the packages was so vivid that, even though he had summoned the department’s K-9 unit, “the dog kind of looked at us (as if to say), ‘Do you really need me for this?’”
— A 34-year-old man was arrested at a Tesco supermarket in Bar Hill, England, on Nov. 12 when he entered the store and threatened employees by showing them a photograph of a gun.
— Two men were arrested in Silver City, N.M., after they broke into the Javalina Coffee House downtown and dragged away the ATM behind their truck. Following the gouge marks in the street running from the Javalina directly to the nearby residence of the men, police nabbed the two.
Armed And Clumsy (All New!)
— Ralik Hansen, 28, a suspect in a dramatic New York City jewelry robbery, heard a knock at the door of a Brooklyn apartment. He squeezed under a couch and accidentally shot himself to death. He thought he was hiding from police; it was a delivery man who was knocking.
— Dennis Emery, 57, who often brandished guns at his home in Pinellas Park, Fla., accidentally mishandled one during a November domestic argument and fatally shot himself in the face.
— A 26-year-old woman in St. Louis, who had recently purchased a handgun to protect against potential violence in Ferguson, was waving the weapon around while riding in a car with a friend. The concerned friend grabbed the gun, and a fatal shot struck her. Police have not closed the case.
Perspective
Despite a 70-year-old U.S. Supreme Court decision to the contrary, six states still have laws exempting parents from homicide charges when they deny a child life-saving medical care because they trust no remedy except prayer. In those states, all the deaths since 1994 under those circumstances have occurred in Idaho, where (according to a November report by Vocativ.com) no prosecutor seems willing to put a trust-in-God parent before a jury. Children in Idaho have died when simple medical treatments (e.g., insulin and fluids for Type I diabetes) were available.
Recurring Themes
— Another drunk driver has hit a pedestrian; had the victim’s body lodge in the windshield; and drive on, apparently oblivious. In this case, the driver was Marcos Ortega, 33, in Ocean Township, N.J. The 66-year-old victim did not survive.
— There is a new report of birds in the wild consuming fermenting berries and then crashing into trees and making goofy-looking landings. The birds this time were Bohemian waxwings in Canada’s Yukon. The Environment Yukon organization set up an “avian drunk tank.”
Weird News Classic (Jan. 2011)
— Two hundred “boredom activists” gathered in London in December, 2010, at James Ward’s annual “banal-apalooza conference,” “Boring 2010.” They listened to ennui-stricken speakers glorify all things dreary. Features included a demonstration of milk-tasting, charts breaking down the characteristics of a man’s sneezes for three years, and a PowerPoint presentation on the color distribution and materials of a man’s necktie collection from one year to the next. One speech — “My Relationship With Bus Routes” — was well-received also. Observed one attendee, “We’re all overstimulated. I think it’s important to stop all that for a while and see what several hours of being bored really feels like.”
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